is a professor emeritus from Kalamazoo Valley Community College where she taught communication. Boyer's poetry and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines. One of her poems was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2007 and she won first place in Rhino's 2006 poetry competition. She received another first place award in the 2008 international competition sponsored by the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Her chapbook, Green (2003), is available from Finishing Line Press.

"This one's a winner. Boyer's imagination reaches out in all directionsto wildebeest and lions in Africa, four thousand flamingos, the last snow to fall on earth, complex love in the Alzheimer's unit, dark matter, a man behind the counter wrapping salmon. Her perceptions are sharp, personal, often unexpected, always freshly phrased. In one masterful section, the poems are spoken by Jake, a rafter on the Colorado River. Page after page, The Clock of the Long Now is arresting, rewarding."Conrad Hilberry

"Marion Boyer opens this luminous collection with a question, in the poem "What Word for This""Do you know/ a translation for eyelash that means moth?" Boyer claims "That is the language (she s) lost," then embarks on a journey, in search of the wild and fragile connections between things. It is a wondrous enterprise, in which "Birds burst up...reforming like a scarf blown from a convertible," an image, like many here, which begins with the natural world and ends in a human gesture of freedom, of release. Boyer reminds us of the present-tense observable wonders of the world, the "black underwings" of "four thousand flamingos ribboning up from a lake," but always to serve the poem's transformative purpose: Between the paws of a female lion "a bare femur/ shines and still she licks its length/ so lovingly I want to sink/ into, become that bone, hunger s center..." and indeed the solid image transports us, time and time again in these poems, to a human core. In fact, human beings abound here, from a woman with "a mark/ inside her thigh the exact shape of Hitchcock s/ profile" to a man who is "vinegar down/ to his bones." From a few scattered facts she creates Jake, who owns a full section of this collection, a character worthy of Faulkner. From a lone shoe on the side of a freeway, Boyer invents "a foot...an ankle,/ bare leg and a woman in green capris/ riding with her foot out the window,/ toes combing the wind." Image, here, begets narrative, and narrative is re-translated back to mystery: "There are so many ways/ never to know another person." It is what can't be known, what can't be translated, the unspeakable, that is most potent in poetry. This is its irony, its strangenessthat a thing made of words is often about what cannot be said. The fluid unspeakable is what Boyer's poems hold at their hungry centers, where "(w)hatever is imagined, there will be something else," where "each molecule/ knits a new door." This book knits doorways into a wise and sweeping imagination, where light is so golden "it must taste like pears." I urge you to open that door, to taste that golden light."Di Suess